How to bulk discontinue products with WP Sheet Editor
The WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin allows you to discontinue WooCommerce products without negatively affecting our site's SEO or losing the opportunity to sell related products. However, discontinuing 500 products can become somewhat tedious if you edit one product at a time.
That’s why, in this guide, we will show you how to increase your productivity by discontinuing hundreds of products in bulk with a few clicks.
We will use the WP Sheet Editor - WooCommerce Products plugin, which allows you to view and manage hundreds of products in an intuitive spreadsheet within WordPress. You can find your products using any field as a search filter, apply bulk changes to all search results, export products to a CSV, and import products quickly.
You'll need the following plugins to follow this tutorial:
Once installed, watch the video above or follow the written instructions below.
1. How to discontinue individual products
Go to WP Sheet Editor → Edit Products and follow the steps in the sections below to discontinue hundreds of WooCommerce products quickly.
While this tutorial is focussing on how to bulk discontinue products, I'll also show you a quick way to discontinue individual items. WP Sheet Editor provides a time-saving way to do this without having to open and edit each product.
- Go to the 'Manage Stock' column.
- Disable this option for the products you’ll discontinue.
- Move to the 'Stock Status' column.
- Choose 'Discontinued'.
- Hit 'Save' to apply the changes.
You don't have to open and edit one product at a time. Instead, you can apply changes to as many products as you want, and then you only have to save the changes once.
2. How to filter your WooCommerce products to discontinue in bulk
WP Sheet Editor contains a powerful search tool that allows you to filter your WooCommerce products using any field as a search parameter. You can search for your products by:
- Keyword in title or content
- Category
- Attribute
- Tag
- Vendor
- Price
- Thumbnail
- Sold individually
- Stock status
- Stock
- Product type
- And any other field
Just hit Search on the plugin’s toolbar, and you’ll be able to use any of these search filters.
As an example, we’ll find all the t-shirts that belong to the Fashion category by selecting these values:
- Contains keyword: tshirt
- Enter Product categories: Fashion
- Hit 'Run Search'.
Once your products are filtered, the search results will be displayed on the spreadsheet.
3. How to bulk discontinue WooCommerce products
Before selecting the Discontinued stock status for all the filtered products, you need to bulk disable the 'Manage Stock' option.
Open the Bulk Edit tool and select the following values:
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows).
- What field do you want to edit: Manage Stock
- Select type of edit: Set value
- Replace existing value with this value: No
- Hit 'Execute Now'.
After that, open the Bulk Edit tool again, and select the following values to change the 'Stock Status' value to 'Discontinued'.
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows).
- What field do you want to edit: Stock status
- Select type of edit: Set value
- Replace existing value with this value: Discontinued
- Hit 'Execute Now'.
Once the changes have been applied to all the filtered products, you will see that the Manage Stock option has been disabled, and the Discontinued stock status has been added to the products.
4. How to find all your discontinued products
Since WP Sheet Editor allows you to use any field of your products as a search filter, you can easily find all the discontinued products in your store.
Just open the Search tool on the plugin’s toolbar and select the following values:
- Tick the 'Enable advanced filters' checkbox.
- Field: Stock status
- Operator: =
- Value: Discontinued
- Hit 'Run Search'.
As you see here, all the discontinued products have been filtered and displayed on the spreadsheet.
Managing your discontinued products
WooCommerce Discontinued Products has lots of other features for managing your discontinued products. You can display discontinued text on product pages, choose whether to show or hide the products in your store, and more.
WP Sheet Editor completely simplifies the way you manage your WooCommerce store. You can save many hours of work and increase your productivity considerably by using any field as a search parameter and applying bulk changes with a few clicks.
Use the two plugins together to discontinue products quickly and easily in your store.